Top Republicans are already talking about cutting Medicare and Social Security next

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The idea of cutting popular programs in an election year has vulnerable Republicans asking, why not infrastructure?

As Republicans turn the final corner on their tax bill, top GOP leaders have already identified their next frontier for 2018: a push to enact sweeping budget cuts on programs the poorest Americans depend on.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and other top Republican leaders, fresh off of tax bill that is estimated to add at least $1 trillion to the national debt, are already sounding the bells about an out-of-control deficit problem. Their targets for closing the gap include Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps.

“We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said on a talk radio show. One of his top spending appropriators echoed the sentiment.

“If someone wants to get serious about debt, come talk to me about entitlements," Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) told CNBC. "Tax cuts produce growth; entitlement spending doesn't.”

But entitlement reform, as Republicans have come to call slashing these programs, comes at a cost. Not every Republican is on board with touching nationally popular programs during an election year that is already shaping up to be favorable to Democrats.

Talk of putting entitlements next on the agenda has divided GOP ranks. Some are eager to make up for the deficit-busting tax cut. But Trump has drawn red tape around their biggest federal spending program targets — Medicare and Social Security — and the prospect of touching the nation’s safety net during a midterm election year is proving too much a risk for others. For many, the answer is to just leave entitlements alone.

“We’re talking about Medicare, and that’s a pretty big bite in the middle of an election year,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) said. “I’m not saying no, but there are other things that could happen.”

After a massive tax cut, Republicans want to cut government spending
By every official analysis, the tax bill is expected to add at least $1 trillion to the national debt. Republicans have ignored the number, with the hope their tax bill will lead to unprecedented economic growth. But now they’re eying ways to trim the government’s spending, targeting everything from food stamps and Medicaid to Social Security and Medicare.

The idea is to “starve the beast,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) says. The tax bill, according to Sanford, is a “bet” to grow the economy. But the real deficit hawkishness comes with government spending.

“Will [the tax bill] help on the margin? Yes. Will it do as much as people advertise? Probably no,” Sanford said of the tax bill. “The real conundrum that we still have to deal with if you really care about debt and deficit is spending and nobody is addressing that in town.”

It’s a line of messaging Republicans have escalated in the past weeks. Their tax bill doesn’t have the deficit problem, it’s the other stuff, they say.

“The reason CHIP is having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) now famously said on the Senate floor, defending Congress’s delayed renewal of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which has been expired since September over a disagreement on ways to offset the program’s cost.

Republicans are pointing to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

“Frankly, it's the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements — because that's really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking,” Ryan said.

Ironically, the tax bill’s projected impact on the deficit automatically triggers a sequestration across some major mandatory spending programs, like Medicare, federal student loans, and agriculture subsidies, and even some funding for customs and border patrol, due to a 2010 deficit-management pay-as-you-go law. But Republicans have already said they have plans to pass a law to bypass the sequester.

Instead, they want to address those programs on their own terms.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16741730/gop-agenda-medicare-social-security